On Easter morning, as we were gathered together as a church, we read Luke 24 where Jesus enters the room where the disciples had been discussing together the fact that the women had found the tomb empty and the two men on the road to Emmaus had walked and talked with Jesus until they recognized him as they broke bread together.
Suddenly, there was Jesus, in their midst, greeting them and saying “Peace be with you.”
He ate with them. The disciples touched them. He was real. He had a physical body.
It wasn’t a made-up story. It wasn’t a fable. No, many of the disciples went to their death because of the reality of what they experienced that day and in other days. People won’t go to their death because of a fairy tale. But they will because they truly see God move in their midst. And that is what happened with Jesus there amongst them.
So as we were together on Sunday, I pointed out that the part that struck me is the historical nature of what we were reading. We weren’t reading something that was considered to be a fable. We were reading history. Not just history because a few writers had their collected works in the Bible, but it is history because what Jesus did has been independently verified and written about by many others, even outside of the Bible.
And as I noted before, people died as they maintained that the story of the resurrection was true. They knew the truth. They knew that the story was real. They knew what they had seen and heard. They knew that Jesus had been revealed, both originally from heaven, and then subsequently in returning from the dead. The revelation was real. It was historical.
I was struck that we are waiting again for a revelation once again. Just as Christ was revealed to the disciples as we read in the Bible, in the same way, we are waiting for Christ to be revealed to us even now. It will not be a matter of a fairy tale. It will not be a fable. It will be a real, historical event when Christ returns. In the same way that we look back today and read about the historical events of Jesus’s first coming, we will one day look back and remember the day that Jesus returned to judge the earth, to destroy evil, and to rule over the earth.
This was one of the main themes that Paul wrote about in his second letter to the Thessalonians. He was well ahead of his time, of course, but so were the prophets that we read about in the Old Testament today. They told of the Messiah that would come thousands of years in advance of Christ’s coming. So now we are waiting for Jesus to return and Paul’s writings continue to be relevant to us even today.
Paul warns the Thessalonians that before Jesus is revealed from heaven, the “lawless one” will be revealed, marking the beginning of the end:
And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming. The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.
2 Thessalonians 2:6-12
Yes, the man of lawlessness will come and will deceive many. We see that deception in our world today, even without this person having been fully revealed yet.
But our hope is in Jesus’s coming, that he will not only be revealed, but as Paul says, he will come and destroy this man of lawlessness even by the breath of his mouth and his splendor.
This man of lawlessness is being revealed to the world, but Christ’s revealing will be majestic. Kingly, and like that of a coming warrior to destroy evil completely. Jesus has defeated the power of sin and death on the cross, but there will come a time when evil will be defeated completely.
The time for that revelation can’t come soon enough, but it is in God’s plan. No one except the Father knows when it will happen, so at this point, we are waiting for Christ to be revealed. But one day, we will look back and remember the day of the revelation of Christ from heaven as the turning point of history as we return to the reign of our God and his Christ.